[AuckLUG] dist-upgrade in Ubuntu

[Daniel Pittman]

"Cheng Eu Chew" <renedox at gmail.com> writes:

> For so long now, I have put off doing a dist-upgrade in ubuntu (I'm
> still using breezy) because I have heard that there are quite a few
> problems when people do it. Things such as losing everything in their
> /home partition to - worse case senario - someone having to throw away
> their computer. :| Although, that may just be a case of not upgrading
> properly.

Upgrading over the Internet or via the alternate CD is very, very
unlikely to destroy your partitions or your computer.  While I don't
doubt that this has been managed[1] I would be ... shocked to find this
was more than an isolated incident.

> So, I'd like to know, what is the "right" way of upgrading my ubuntu
> installation? Is it just as simple as "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade"? 

Yes, there is a right way, and no, the recommended path isn't as simple
as just running a dist-upgrade.  Read the release notes for the next
release of Ubuntu which include instructions on how to achieve an
upgrade as safely as possible.

> Or is there more to that? 

Well, I just used dist-upgrade and it worked for me(tm).

> Will I have to sit through the whole thing to (re)configure partitions
> or does apt do it by itself? 

Good lord, no.  If you encounter *anything* to do with partitioning or
anything like that you have gone very, very wrong.

You have installed software on Ubuntu, right?  Upgrading is exactly like
that, only with more packages and configuration files involved. 

> Can I set it to run remotely through SSH (through screen)? - as I'm
> not usually at home. What exactly happens once I hit the enter button
> to execute the command?

You can, but I don't recommend it.  If something goes wrong you might
need to recover by hand, without network access.  

Have a suitable CD on hand to boot some sort of working Linux where you
can recover your boot loader, if necessary, even though that is highly
unlikely to be a problem.

Make sure you can cope if X fails to start, or if GNOME fails to load,
which is a more probable failure[2] -- especially if you removed core
files such as 'ubuntu-desktop' in the past.

> Having backed up most of the important information that I need (uni
> and work stuff) I still can't really afford to lose my data and
> reconfigure everything again.
>
> Am I just being paranoid - for lack of a better word - here or does
> everything run very smoothly?

I would expect everything to be pretty smooth for an upgrade to either
of Dapper or Edgy at this stage, but problems can always crop up.

Catastrophic data loss is extremely unlikely, though, almost to the
point of being impossible.  You may not be able to boot the system but
you can likely boot from a LiveCD and read the disk content no matter
what.

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  ...though destroying any common hardware would be unexpected.

[2]  Not likely, you understand, but possible.  

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